Metron lay on his back. His expression was agonized, his eyes screwed shut. The ring was on his left middle finger. Without opening his eyes, he raised his hand so that the sapphire lay against the middle of his forehead. His right hand groped on his chest, then closed on the crystal amulet.
Vascay untangled himself from Lord Thalemos. Both men appeared to be all right, at least as much so as Garric himself was.
Sighing, Garric shoved himself onto his knees, then hunched upright. He could feel every part of himself; not just a finger, say, but every atom of skin and flesh and bone that formed each finger.
The pieces had been separate. Now they were joined again, were him again; but in the future Garric would never be able to forget their individual existences.
He looked around. The ground was mostly bare, but arching upward around him were clumps of flat-trunked green vegetation that hid most of the sky.
Something croaked. It sounded like a frog the size of an ox.
“You all right, Gar?” Vascay said. He still had one of his javelins. He used it butt-down as a cane as he got to his feet.
“Yeah,” Garric said. He gestured at the forest. “Vascay, these aren’t trees. It’s grass. We’re in a field of grass.”
Vascay nodded agreeably, eyeing the landscape as he wiped loam from his javelin’s butt spike. “Could be,” he said. “Could be. What I’m happiest to see now is that it’s not grass full of Protectors, eh?”
Thalemos walked toward Garric and stopped a polite double pace away with his hands crossed behind him, waiting to be acknowledged. Vascay had turned his attention to the long cut along Hame’s side.
“Lord Thalemos?” Garric said. “You want something of me?”
All the bandits were up, apparently unharmed by their passage to this place. Toster was using the edge of a giant grassblade to clean his axe. He saw Garric and gave him a shamefaced grin.
Toster had nothing to be ashamed of. Telling him so would only make his embarrassment worse, though.
“Yes, I’m Thalemos bor-Laminol,” the youth said. “Actually, what I wanted to do, sir, is introduce myself. And thank you for saving my life.”
He smiled shyly, and added, “Saving my life several times that I know of.”
“I’m Garric or-Reise,” Garric said. “Or you can call me Gar, as the Brethren do.”
He looked away as though to survey their surroundings. Thalemos as a person made quite a decent impression. The trouble was that when Garric looked closely at the youth, he saw instead Tint’s terror-contorted face as she leaped toward the snake that would kill her.
“I, ah…” Thalemos said. “Master Garric, I won’t keep you from your duties but, ah, I’m very grateful.”
In a rush, he added, “Metron wanted me to go through the portal immediately. I refused to go until you were ready, sir.”
Garric met the youth’s eyes and managed to smile. “Because you thought Metron might not bother waiting for the rest of us if you were clear?” he said. “I’m glad that possibility occurred to you, milord. And that you chose to act on it.”
The strange forest was alive with sounds, none of which proceeded from an obvious source. Most of the notes were very low, more in the order of trembles felt through the ground than ordinary noises.
Vascay came over to Garric and Thalemos. He nodded toward Metron, the only member of the group still on the ground, and said to both men, “Is he all right?”
With a quirked smile he added to Thalemos, “And if he’s not, do you know what we do next?”
“He’ll come around, I guess,” Garric said. Metron hadn’t moved from where he lay initially, but he’d clearly relaxed. “The art—wizardry—takes a lot out of people.”
He stretched mightily, noticing kinks in muscles where he hadn’t expected them. He added, “So do other things, of course. I’ll be feeling this day’s work tomorrow.”
Garric grinned and—as King Carus would have—added, “Assuming I’m feeling anything tomorrow, of course.”
A sound like that of a cicada, immensely magnified, came from the side where the giant grass gave over to oak-thick briars reaching immeasurably skyward. Metron rose to one elbow, looking in that direction. Garric touched the hilt of his sword, remembering that he hadn’t sharpened the blade after the hard service it’d seen carving through the serpent’s scales and spine.
The call sounded again, measurably closer. The bandits bunched instinctively, readying their weapons. “Chief, something’s coming!” Ademos said.
“Form a line between me and Gar,” Vascay said calmly. “Stay close but don’t get in each other’s way. Hame, you watch our back. This may all be a trick.”
He walked to the side, placing himself on the projected left end. Garric drew his sword and strode to a spot ten or a dozen double paces to the chief’s right. One of the grassblades, so large that Garric’s spread arms would barely span it, rose behind him. He supposed it’d protect his back, though if the animals living in this place were on a scale with the vegetation…
The call sounded a third time. A creature holding a tube with a plunger like an elongated butter churn stepped into sight twenty feet from Garric. It was six-limbed and chitinous, but it stood upright like a short man. It stopped when it saw the humans. Toster raised his axe in both hands and stepped forward.
“No!” cried Metron. “These are our allies. They’ll guide and protect us for the rest of the way.”
Two more of the creatures minced out of the forest to join the first. These wore gorgets of beaten gold. They didn’t speak. Could they speak?
“Wizard, what are you playing at?” Vascay shouted. “Do you think I don’t recognize them? They’re the Archai! They’re the monsters that brought down the New Kingdom after Prince Garric died on Tisamur!”
“Yes, they’re the Archai,” Metron said, walking forward shakily. “But that’s all in the past, Master Vascay. They’re with us against the Intercessor, now. We can’t succeed without their help.”
Garric looked from the wizard to the gang’s chieftain. For the moment he felt nothing, nothing.
He couldn’t have died on Tisamur: he’d never been on Tisamur in his life. But…
“Against the Intercessor?” Vascay said, stalking toward the wizard in the center of the line. His peg dug into the soft ground, causing him to limp. “Of course they’re against the Intercessor, you fool! It was the Intercessor that kept the Archai from sweeping over Laut as they did all other islands of the kingdom! What are you thinking of?”
“That was a thousand years ago,” Metron said, facing Vascay but not raising his voice. “That was a different age, Master Vascay. We have the future of Laut and of the Isles to consider now. And our own future as well.”
He made a spreading gesture. The sapphire winked on his middle finger. “How do you propose to get out of this place? For myself, I know of no way save through the Archai’s help…and even then it will be hard, and very dangerous.”
The Archa with the tube held it high with one of his middle arms, balancing the upper portion between the saw-edged top limbs. The creatures didn’t carry weapons, but their limbs alone were designed to kill.
He—She? It?—jerked down on the plunger. The tube vibrated another raucous shriek. Prada cocked a javelin, in reflex rather than as a conscious threat. Vascay touched the man to calm him.
“Well, Master Vascay?” Metron said, letting a sneer of superiority creep into his tone. “What shall it be?”
“Chief?” said Hame. Vascay looked at him.
“It wasn’t these bugs as killed my wife,” Hame said. “It was Protectors did that.”
Vascay swore into the empty forest, quietly but with a tone and viciousness that Garric hadn’t expected to hear from that man’s lips. He looked at Metron again.